Past and Present | Page 7

thousands where we
once spent hundreds; but can purchase nothing good with them. In Poor
and Rich, instead of noble thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury
alternating with mean scarcity and inability. We have sumptuous
garnitures for our Life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them.
It is an enchanted wealth; no man of us can yet touch it. The class of
men who feel that they are truly better off by means of it, let them give
us their name!
Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors,--with what
advantage they can report, and their Doctors can: but in the heart of
them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what
increase of
blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are
they even what they call 'happier? Do they look with satisfaction on
more things and human faces in this God's Earth; do more things and
human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so. Human faces
gloom discordantly, disloyally on one another. Things, if it be not mere
cotton and iron things, are growing disobedient to man. The Master
Worker is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman;

clamours, in vain hitherto, for a very simple sort of 'Liberty:' the liberty
'to buy where he finds it cheapest, to sell where he finds it dearest.'
With guineas jingling in every pocket, he was no whit richer; but now,
the very guineas threatening to vanish, he feels that he is poor indeed.
Poor Master Worker! And the Master Unworker, is not he in a still
fataller situation?
Pausing amid his game-preserves, with awful
eye,--as he well may! Coercing fifty-pound tenants; coercing, bribing,
cajoling; doing what he likes with his own. His mouth full of loud

futilities, and arguments to prove the excellence of his
Corn-law;*
and in his heart the blackest misgiving, a desperate half-consciousness
that his excellent Corn-law is indefensible, that his loud arguments for

it are of a kind to strike men too literally dumb.

[* Digital transcriber note: The "corn-law" that Carlyle
repeatedly refers to was an English sliding-scale tariff on grain, which
kept the price of bread artificially inflated.]

To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it
blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuller, in any way better? Who has
got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for him, like a true servant, not
like a false mock-servant; to do him any real service whatsoever? As
yet no one. We have more riches than any Nation ever had before; we
have less good of them than any Nation ever had before. Our successful
industry is hitherto unsuccessful; a strange success, if we stop here! In
the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and
full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied. Workers, Master
Workers, Unworkers, all men, come to a pause; stand fixed, and cannot
farther. Fatal paralysis spreading inwards, from the extremities, in St.
Ives workhouses, in
Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if towards
the heart itself. Have we actually got enchanted, then; accursed by
some god?--
Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians. He got gold, so that
whatsoever he touched became gold,--and he, with his long ears, was
little the better for it. Midas had misjudged the celestial music-tones;
Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods: the gods gave him his wish,
and a pair of long ears, which also were a good appendage to it. What a
truth in these old Fables!
Chapter II
The Sphinx
How true, for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who sat by
the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers, which if they
could not answer she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx is this Life of ours,
to all men and societies of men. Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly

celestial loveliness and
tenderness; the face and bosom of a goddess,
but ending in claws and the body of a lioness. There is in her a celestial
beauty,-- which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is
also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal.
She is a
goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned; one still half-imprisoned,--the
inarticulate, lovely still encased in the inarticulate, chaotic. How true!
And does she not propound her riddles to us? Of each man she asks
daily, in mild voice, yet with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the
meaning of this Day? What thou canst do Today; wisely attempt to
do?" Nature, Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this
grand
unnameable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is
as a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who
can discern her behests and do them; a destroying fiend to them who
cannot. Answer